


Cooking Time May Vary

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [52]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Cooking, Earth-3, F/M, Families of Choice, Fluff, Food, Gen, Mirror Universe, Pancakes, Team Bonding, a distinct preponderance of grain-based foods, a ridiculous lack of concern for people trying to shoot you, because it made more sense than trying to get any of them to stand alone, bundled together, eating on the cheap, it takes a village, oh look waylon pov, rogues that play together stay together, series of vignettes on a theme, teen angst a la ex-assassin, why is that so hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-25 19:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18170732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Family is a thing you build together. With knives. And forks. And spatulas. And a daily tablespoon of trust.





	1. April 20 1994

**Author's Note:**

> I've chaptered the individual sections of this with their dates as noted on the Official Timeline, and then placed the fic in the series where the last section fits, because the _point_ of ordering these fics chronologically is to allow the 'verse to be read from the beginning as smoothly as possible, even though that's not how it's being written.

They were reasonably young, they were in good health, they'd been married just over a year.

They were being pursued by an _actual_ _mob_ of bounty hunters, because yesterday Owlman had quadrupled the price on their heads.

It still wasn't high enough to attract the _real_ heavy hitters of the murder world, thank goodness, but that kind of balloon in payoff without any significant spike in risk, and in a city where the police could be counted on not to interfere in Owlman's affairs, had drawn every part-time or up-and-coming bounty chaser and hitman in the state.

The well-intentioned types that had gone ahead and taken work from a person like Owlman in spite of probable misgivings, on the basis that the clowns _were_ criminals after all, had all dropped out at this point. Watching two people ambushed at their grocery shopping keep ahead of the homicidal mob you were part of while going out of their way to prevent collateral damage was demoralizing, if you cared about anything besides money.

The amount of money on offer was high enough it wasn't surprising they'd taken the job at first, though. The targets were even now giving serious consideration to trying to set up a scam where one of them in disguise turned the other in, collected the bounty, and then broke them out, though the conversation had wandered from logistics to the reasons it would or would not make sense to take that risk for forty thousand dollars, and from there back to the grocery shopping.

"But I mean," Jokester said, stealing a glance around the corner of one of the buildings framing the dead end alley they'd ducked into, and sighing a little to see they'd been spotted after all, "am I acting poorer than usual lately? People have been making leading comments about our income."

Harlequin laughed, going to her knees to roll across the open street and take cover behind a heavy raised flower bed before any of their pursuers could shoot her. Being left with no angles of retreat was more alarming right now than being surrounded, and people could clear (and had cleared) the empty street that was now behind her more easily than they could the buildings that would otherwise have backstopped the gunshots, and which couldn't have been counted on to actually stop the bullets. "I bet it's because you make rice all the time lately!"

J followed her, kneecapping a man with one of the paralytic dart guns they'd taken off their second attacker as he dashed across the street. "There's nothing wrong with rice!"

"Sweetie, you've used the _rice to meet you_ joke the last five times you've cooked! Is this commentary on how many friends people are bringing over?"

"What, no, you know I love guests!" They both dropped flat for a second as a wall of bullets passed screaming over them, and Jokester turned his head to murmur, "Okay, you're right, I'm overworking it."

Harlequin knocked their foreheads together gently, and then the fire stuttered off and they leapt up, her dart gun firing one precise shot into the throat of the maniac with the machine gun, who slowly keeled over without managing to reload. "I like a man who can admit when he's wrong." She vaulted forward over the flower bed and into the enemy lines, where the bounty hunters would have a harder time bringing guns into play without killing each other.

They'd lost everyone they were going to just by running, it was time to thin the horde a little.

"Sign of character," Jokester bragged. His hammer scythed through the air, knocking down men like ninepins.

"You are certainly that." Harley elbowed a man in the balls on her way up to punch somebody else. "It's not that I'm complaining about it, I don't mind if you actually _want_ to cook rice. I know I make too much pasta."

"You make amazing pasta."

"Awww." She rolled across his back to bring both her feet down on the face of a man with a snake tattooed on his neck and entirely too many guns, and dropped a kiss on her husband's cheek on the way past. "Thanks, plumcake." He chortled, and his hammer punched two people in the face.

"But seriously," Harlequin continued, dodging around a knife, skipping over a bullet, and narrowing her eyes at the knife-fighter, who had a swastika pin on the strap of his shoulder holster, "if they're offering to help we can direct them toward one of the aid groups, but if they're gettin' judgey? Screw 'em."

She broke the Nazi's jaw so hard she had to dodge one of his teeth. "I like rice!"


	2. September 12 1998

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short one! And I'm still spelling Pam's surname with an E because I'm stubborn like that. 
> 
> Join us on Discord, btw! Come talk about what you want more of in my fic or yell about Batman or whatever you like within reason [here](https://discord.gg/upPqKS9).

"Patta-cake, patta-cake, baker's man," Jokester chanted, "bake me a cake as fast as you can!"

Face screwed up in furious concentration, little Ella managed to thwak the middle of his palm two tries in a row. It had no relationship to the rhythm of the rhyme, didn't make a slapping sound because her half-curled fingers got in the way, and she definitely hadn't coordinated a clap in between, but for nineteen months it was a reasonably impressive feat, and she crowed triumph. He father matched her in volume, though thankfully not at quite so shrill a pitch. "Oh, yes, who's my clever girl?"

"'Ssa me dada!" The baby pounded her chubby fists together several times, less it seemed in an attempt to applaud herself than to make up for all the claps she seemed vaguely aware she had skipped.

"That's right!"

Harvey Dent flipped the two pancakes sizzling in adjacent frying pans, and exchanged a weary look over the doting father's purple head with Doctor Pamela Eisley. The superpowered fugitive botanist looked as gorgeous as ever in jean overalls and a slightly raveled turtleneck, with her hair pinned haphazardly atop her head, but judging by the way she hunched over her coffee she hadn't been getting enough sleep.

Surprising, actually. She'd gone on sleeping over at Jokester and Harlequin's more often than not even after the baby was born, and fielded a share of midnight wake-up calls in spite of not being a parent, for which Harvey saluted her, but at this point Ella was largely sleeping through the night.

New project, maybe? But if botany was keeping her up all night, Harvey would expect her to have slept in the park, where all her work was.

Maybe it was just bad dreams. Harvey could relate to that. He offered her a thin, encouraging smile—she'd known him for over two years now, long enough to watch the undamaged side of his face to gauge expressions, and ignore the other half's perpetual grimace and glare.

"Roll it, and cross it, and mark it with an E, and put it in the oven for Ellie and me!"

The diapered child flopped over onto the floor in shrieking giggles of accomplishment at having her name appear in a song, and the much larger child she called Daddy swept her up onto his lap and started to tickle her belly, presumably to prolong the giggling. Harvey took one step to the side to avoid a flailing elbow.

"I don't know about the oven," he said loudly over the racket, "but the _pan_ cakes are going to Aunt Pam first, because _she's_ sitting quietly at the table like a good girl."

J and Ella scrambled to get up off the floor, which was welcome since it cleared the way between range and table so Harvey could give Pamela her breakfast, which she accepted with the magnanimity of a queen. Jokester was only mildly sheepish as he dusted himself and his daughter off, and got her installed in her high chair yelling in high C about _pamcakes_ , while Harvey poured out batter into both pans again.

"Is Harley going to be home in time to eat?" Harvey asked, squinting at the quantity of batter left in the bowl. He didn't have a lot of practice cooking for more than two. Well, more honestly he didn't have a _lot_ of practice cooking at all, but especially not for a group. He'd only been fourteen when his father died.

"Don't know," J shrugged, reaching the honey over to Pamela before she asked for it. "Depends on the patients. There's a couple of people with infections who were supposed to come in today before work—if they're all mending well and nobody unexpected comes in with something hard, she'll probably make it, but if somebody—"

"Yes, okay," said Harvey, because that was all he'd needed to know and J didn't always remember that words like 'debridement' didn't go well with breakfast. "I suppose it doesn't matter," he allowed, waiting for bubbles to reach the middle of the cake as the edges solidified. "I'll use up all the batter, and if we have leftovers I'm sure they'll get eaten."

"That's the spirit!" Jokester cheered, and then was distracted from further planning by Ella beginning to whimper about Aunt Pam having pancakes when she did not. Harvey flipped the current batch hurriedly. He _really_ needed to get a new apartment. His jealousy of J's domestic felicity was almost beginning to be outweighed by appreciation for not _ever_ having had to be the person primarily responsible for a toddler, especially one throwing a tantrum.

…though he hadn't stopped wondering sometimes, quietly, what he and Gilda would have called their daughter, if they'd had one.


	3. July 8 2003

Waylon Jones was scooping the irregular rounded forms of drop-cookies off their baking sheet with a battered stainless-steel spatula, the handle looking more like that of a soup spoon in his massive hand, which was sweating between scales.

It was July, almost exactly half a year since tracking weird new designer drugs to their source had led them to a skinny hostage chemist in the process of blowing up a building while still locked in its attic. Gotham wasn't at its best in the summer, maybe, but it _was_ one of the better cities of its size to spend summer in—northerly enough that breaking ninety-five was an event even in the urban heat island, cooled by wind off the sea, and for all the failures of municipal services like police and even water, the sanitation crews in charge of the streets and dumpsters were unusually well-funded and heavily staffed, so the usual summer garbage smells were minimized.

(This last was one of the _very few_ genuine benefits to sharing town with a wealthy authoritarian maniac obsessed with imposing order.)

Gotham was an easy city to get through summer in, but a project like baking, in July, without air conditioning, was still hardly for the faint of heart. All the windows and doors in the Circus kitchen were propped open, to catch the slightest breeze and let out what oven heat they could, there was an electric fan chirring determinedly in the corner, and no one had had reason to complain about having to wait for butter to soften.

Outside, kids were playing soccer in the street, and their shouts of triumph and outrage drifted in atop the layered hum of traffic, underlying the buzz of conversation filling the room.

"—serotonin. And I told him, the formation of positive associations relies on a _great_ number of factors besides serotonin levels, and reuptake inhibitors are only—"

Waylon kept piling cookies, carefully stacking a stable, pyramidal sort of mound rather than go get a second plate, until the baking sheet was empty, and then picked up his spoon to start dropping globs of dough again. He'd stopped paying more than cursory attention to the conversation once Ed got Jon talking, because once he'd settled in it had turned out that when relaxed the shy man spoke quite volubly, but only in Science.

Waylon could probably have followed _most_ of it, but doubted it would be worth the effort. Ed had this. _Waylon_ had the bake sale side of an important community fundraiser to prepare for, and the nuts he'd put in this half of the cookie dough were too expensive to waste any by burning.

"—if the side effects were controlled for, but side effects shouldn't necessarily be controlled for if they affect the—no, Edward, stop, if you add any more water your crust will turn out crunchy."

Nigma, flour across his nose and the sleeves of his emerald sweater rolled up to the elbow, flung the pastry cutter in his hand pettishly into the bowl with the half-made dough. "How is it," he demanded, "that I am the _only man in this family_ who cannot bake?"

Waylon and the good doctor Crane shared a look. Jon's was a little shocky around the edges; maybe he hadn't noticed himself being adopted, even this far in. That was understandable; Waylon had been taken off-guard the first time it happened to him, too, and _he'd_ been an orphaned teen faced with a perfectly reasonable set of parents. (The second time had been more subtle but still less surprising. He'd had practice, and known these idiots for years already by then.)

"If it helps," Waylon offered, returning to Ed's question, "Harvey's no good either. He just hates to admit weakness."

Though personally, Waylon thought being at his office, which had a window air-conditioning unit, instead of here enduring proximity to the oven, was already doing that.

Harvey Dent was officially the weak link in the pastry chain. Let it be written.

Ed drew in a breath, then let it out loud and slow. "That does help, actually. Jon, why did you even notice how much water I was adding?"

Crane shrugged, all his awkwardness brought back by the challenge. "I hate making the same mistake twice," he said. "And my grandmother was always very particular about pastry."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Also he's just Acutely Aware Of His Surroundings.)


	4. November 17 2003

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I apparently can't do fluff without mixing in some contextual sads, note that this chapter features references to people being horrible to children.

Cooking was an important bonding activity in the Gotham Circus.

This was largely because of Jokester, who believed intensely in relationship-building through food and had spent his first several years in Gotham cementing many of his closest friendships through recipe exchanges and assorted edible gifts.

But it was also down to Harley, who believed in the sort of fairness that led to poorly-followed chore rosters in communal living situations, and Waylon Jones, who had picked up stress-baking from his adoptive mother in his teens, and seemed to find the process extra comforting whenever he acquired an assistant.

They were all busy people with irregular schedules, so even when all of them were living out of each other's pockets (as lately) they only rarely sat down to eat without _someone_ being missing. There were plenty of days, even, that nobody at all managed a sit-down meal, besides whoever was in charge of feeding Ella.

And J had enough friends in the restaurant business that a lot of the time when they _did_ sit down it was at least partly to takeout, often the leftover tacos no one had bought that day, or prank-call pizza none of the employees had wanted.

(Thanks to Pam, there was usually _something_ fresh, to supplement the primary source of nourishment with important vitamins and other trace nutrients.)

But there _was_ a rough schedule of whose-turn-it-was-to-cook, and several competent cooks around the place who were fairly easy to recruit as help when it was your turn and you'd gotten ambitious. So up to several times a month, even for no special occasion, dinner turned into a major communal project.

Tonight was the first time this had happened since the second Talon had defected and been taken into their home, but he had been here a week and the atmosphere was remarkably relaxed. Ella had been almost impossible to get down for her nap earlier and was asleep upstairs, so everyone was trying to be at least slightly quiet, which seemed to be good for their newest member's nerves.

Harley was glad this had come together today, honestly; it was Thanksgiving in a little over a week and this was one of the years the holiday fell on her birthday, and she knew dinner _that_ day was going to be an all-hands-on-deck extravaganza—not the dinner-for-eighty-and-extras in a high school gymnasium they'd thrown for the holiday one year, because J knew she preferred her birthdays to be more private, but the kitchen would be packed. Waylon's parents might come. There would probably be another spat over oven use.

She wanted Jason to get used to their group cooking habits _before_ he was faced with a Double Holiday Bonanza.

The kitchen was vanilla-fragrant with the sugar cookies Waylon had been wheedled into making, crosscut by the sharp salty tang of soy and herbs as, between batches going in and out of the oven, he blended the cooking sauce for the massive pan of stir fry he was going to serve over noodles about forty minutes from now, and the fresh clean smells of newly sliced carrots, parsnips, and celery.

Most of the assistance-recruiting Waylon had done today was for vegetable chopping. This was the kind of thing that was ageless drudgery for a single chef but over in a cheerful trice with a few helpers; J had tugged Jason with him when answering Waylon's call for aid, and the boy had come without objection.

Considering he'd voluntarily inserted himself into the process of doing the dishes during his second meal with them, he might even genuinely not _mind_. Harley was pretty sure that contributing to the household helped his sense of security.

It was always possible he was acting merely out of a perceived need to pacify his new caretakers, but as long as their expectations were reasonable she thought responsibilities could only help his sense of control.

Giving him a potential weapon was hardly a trust gesture at all, when he was already sleeping under the same roof as her child, but when she'd taken up the vegetable peeler and handed him a knife and cutting-board, she'd seen the surprise.

Jason's knife work was of course impeccable, and he had started out with his mouth tight, creating perfectly even slivers of carrot like his life depended on the results. Until Harley started cooing over the precision and asked him to carve her some of those decorative carrot-flowers, and by the time he'd run out of carrots he'd relaxed considerably.

He was on to squash now, butternut being cut into slightly less perfect cubes as he split his attention between the task, the conversation, and occasional flickers of paranoia that had him checking the corners of the room either for escape routes or threats that might have intruded since he last looked.

He'd had to give up somewhat on the spot-checks, once Jokester started focusing most of his cheerful energy on him.

"I'm just not funny," he shrugged, persisting in demurral.

"Sure you are!" J protested. "Basically the first thing you said after you introduced yourself was making fun of me, that was hilarious!"

"He means when you said you were going to regret picking our side after he started trying to nickname you," put in Harvey, who'd halved some of the endless avocados Pam's potted avocado trees produced and then left them sitting with their pits in, so they wouldn't age while the rest of the vegetables were processed, and pulled out a paperback book. He'd been half-reading, half-conversing ever since. It was one of his quirks.

"…okay," said Jason, who had given no sign of noticing that Harvey's socializing from behind a novel was odd. "I guess that's a kind of joke. It's the only kind I remember how to make, though."

"You'll get the hang of it again," Harley reassured him, because she was sure he would. It was astonishing, really, how far he'd come in just over a week—she'd seen the same things in the second Talon her Mr. J had, if a bit less acutely, but the sheer _rate_ at which a perfectly normal, if clearly traumatized, teenage boy had come to the fore was astonishing. It was enough to make Pam and Harvey suspect some kind of trick. But they were just cynical for its own sake sometimes.

She gestured encouragement with her vegetable peeler. "You can start with puns!"

She frowned at the small pyramid of peeled sweet potatoes she'd created, then stood up, shoved half of them in front of Harvey, then went to get a knife of her own to cut up the remaining heap, as Harvey sighed and set his book aside.

"Puns?" Jason repeated, less like he thought he was too good for such a low form of humor and more like they were an intimidating challenge.

"Puns aren't hard!" J assured him. "They're the easiest thing once you get the hang of them. All you need to make them work is two people who speak the same language. _Really good_ puns are hard, they were practically an art form back in Shakespeare's time, right, but anybody can do wordplay, that's the best part." He raised his voice enough carry into the den/lab at the back of the house, where Ed had been last seen tinkering with somebody's desktop computer on the coffee table. Hopefully not enough to wake the child upstairs. "Hey, Eddie! Are tectonic plates dishwasher-safe?"

"Not sure!" Enigma's voice replied a beat later. "But they're definitely the best for serving continental breakfasts!"

"Ahahaha you're a riot, man! See?" J asked Jason. "Jus' like that. Easiest thing. Come on, gimme something for…onion." He picked one up as he said it, spun it over his knuckles and convinced it to whirl in his palm like a top for a few seconds. "C'mon, tears, layers, anything."

Jason glowered at the onion for a few seconds before scowling down at the squash under his knife again. Very deliberately chopped off an uneven hunk three times the size of any of his neat cubes, and grumbled, "I got nothing. Guess my pun-making skills are just as broken as the rest of me."

Jokester did a sort of full-body flail that involved dropping the onion and grabbing the edge of his seat to keep himself from falling out of it. "Hey, now, Jase, kid, who called you something like that, you're not _broken._ "

Two abrupt slashes and Jason had carved an X through his lumpy segment of squash, bisecting it diagonally twice over so that it fell into four neat triangles, and the kitchen knife stood trembling, point-first in the wooden cutting board. "Then _maybe,_ " the teenager bit out, his back now a hunched arc of hunted fury, "my sense of humor isn't inclined to sit up and _beg._ "

He shoved his chair back and stormed out, slamming the door that gave onto the front hallway. Even in a temper tantrum he apparently couldn't bring himself to stomp, but the creaks that came next were those of the stairs, not the front door, so that was something.

"Wow," commented Enigma, who had appeared in the other kitchen doorway somewhere between the word _broken_ and the slamming, like the nosy parker he was. Jokester clicked his tongue in disapproval and got up to stride after his ward.

A vast expanse of cheerful ultramarine-blue quilted fabric, spangled with cows and moons, blocked his line of sight before he got far. "Don't." It was Waylon, barring his access to the just-slammed door with the shovel-sized hand that had just extracted the last batch of cookies.

"I just…" J said, hands wide with helpless.

"You screwed up," said Waylon, pulling off his custom giant-sized oven mitt. "Back off."

"What he said," agreed Ed. "I mean, I know people aren't my thing and I didn't even catch the whole dust-up, but give the kid some _space_."

Jokester looked around his kitchen haplessly. Ed and Waylon didn't even fully _trust_ Jason last he checked, but now they were closing ranks like they had to _protect_ the kid from him. "Harl?" he asked hopefully. "Angelcakes?"

She gave him a small, apologetic smile, and shook her head. Her chest hurt. "You were pushing. You always do. Sometimes…it's not the right thing. It's my fault; I should have noticed when…."

J heaved a sigh. If it was unanimous, then he had better stay here. "Can _somebody_ go check on him, though?" he asked.

"I'll go," said Croc, carefully turning the oven off. "Don't eat all those before I get back," he said sternly.

"Word of honor," the clown saluted, and Waylon rolled his eyes.

* * *

The word he was looking for, Waylon Jones realized, as he stood and listened to Jason breathing on the other side of the bedroom door, was _heinous._

Not what J had done—that was just careless. Dumb. The Jokester wasn't ungentle, but he was bad at caution. Not Jason, either, though he'd done enough things over the last couple of years that deserved the word.

 _Heinous_ was the fact that he was listening to a boy not quite sixteen systematically refuse to have a panic attack after shouting at his caretakers.

Waylon had grown up in the foster system. Near the end of the growing up he'd been adopted by good people, and near the beginning he'd been under the power of his horrible aunt, but the middle was a dreary smear of grey loneliness and a resentment of his deformity that had become self-pity more often than he wanted to admit.

He would have given anything, as a kid, to have a parent who loved him, who didn't think he was a monster.

Jason would have given even more, to have a keeper who wasn't trying to turn him into one.

It made Waylon feel small, but in the clean, dutiful, energizing way that he'd felt it when he'd gone to live with a boy who'd been born with only one half-functional lung and a boy without eyes who couldn't hear well either, and a girl who'd taken so much brain damage as a baby that eating a meal under her own power was a monumental achievement. At least his body didn't keep him from _doing_ anything, besides going out in public without being treated like a freak.

(And getting normal jobs, it had turned out later, but still. He could do _more_ than most people, not less, so as freaks went he was damn lucky.)

Ed and Pam and Harvey didn't trust the boy yet, though they were getting there. Waylon _knew_ he wasn't safe.

But he was pulling for this kid with all he had.

The breathing had steadied out. He tapped on the door. It was the smallest room in the house, barely fit a bed; didn't have a real window and so was technically a large closet, but Jason had picked it over sharing with Ed; he'd said no window was kind of a relief, considering his status as a fugitive.

"Yeah?" the word came out in a crack of anger, to keep from shaking.

"You want cookies?"

"Wha…"

"You want I should bring you some cookies?"

"…I'm not a kid, you know."

"Sure," said Waylon, because he was the kind of person who lied. "But the cookies are done _now_ , and I can't bring you dinner until it's over."

Of course, Jason might want to come out again to eat with all of them, but he shouldn't _have_ to. Waylon would bet his left hand and his tail that Owlman had used control over the kid's access to food to coerce him, and if Jason wanted to avoid J until they were both over his outburst then Waylon would make sure he knew he didn't have to choose between that and not going hungry.

Jason was quiet so long Waylon almost decided he was being frozen out, and left, but then a much smaller voice said from the other side of the door: "Maybe a couple cookies? And milk," he decided, picking up a little strength. "Could I please have some milk."

"Sure thing," said Waylon, and headed back downstairs to put together a tray.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I'll get Waylon's backstory up at some point. He just keeps being like 'I only show up in this story to background punch things, bake cookies, and reassure children. It's in my contract.' 
> 
> The horrible aunt is canonical; child services removing Killer Croc from her custody is...not. 
> 
> Also fun fact Waylon and Jason debuted in the same comic, although at the time they were a circus kid and the shadowy criminal mastermind who killed his parents.


	5. February 19 2005

Jokester was sitting with his chair tipped back against the wall on two legs, beside a table heaped with gleaming dark chestnuts, his colors bright against the driving snow beyond the kitchen window as he scoured a tattered tome entitled 'The Big Book of How to Cook Absolutely Everything.'

It was certainly a book, and quite large, but this wouldn't be the first time it had failed to live up to the rest of its name. Scraps of paper protruding from it here and there showed where additions had been made to amend various oversights, but there was always something else. "Well, it's not under 'roasting,'" Jokester muttered.

Jason snatched up three of the dark, smooth little oblongs and began to juggle them, one-handed—he was getting better all the time. "Check the nuts section," he suggested.

J scowled into his cookbook. "There _is_ no nuts section."

"But if there was, you would be in it." Jason grinned, and made a triumphant snare drum _tssh_ sound through his teeth, as Jokester lowered the book and stared, jaw slack.

 _He'd_ just been set up as the straight man. _Him!_ Got handed a line and walked into it hook, line, sinker. Hadn't even seen it coming a little bit!

The front two chair legs hit the floor and the Big Book of How to Cook Absolutely Everything fell beside the heap of chestnuts. Jason's grin was just starting to fade into uncertainty at the absence of a laugh, and his juggling hand slowing down, when Jokester lunged forward and pinned his arms against his sides in a fierce hug. "I really, seriously love you, kid," he muttered, as the juggling chestnuts hit the floor. His voice caught in a way that meant he was tearing up, just a little.

Jason swallowed a lump in his own throat and folded his forearms around J's shoulders as best he could. Fifteen months, since he took the clown up on his offer and started to learn how to be Jason again. Fifteen months, becoming part of their family.

They'd been through a lot together; the Circus had stood by each other like Jason hadn't really believed anymore that anybody did for anybody.

He knew what he'd been. What he always would be. Jason was no hero. Maybe someday he could put the Talon far enough behind him to be some kind of good person, but he knew he wasn't there yet.

But right now that didn't matter.

He was _home._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo, done! ^^
> 
> August-September 2004 was the Martian Invasion, which was a really intense period which I will totally get around to writing up properly so you guys can read about it, I swear. So J's still a little overdramatic even for him.


End file.
